All of Andreas_Massey's Comments + Replies

Thank you for your feedback! These are important points, and I’m glad you brought it up.


·      EA contributions are unclear
This is a valid concern. However, we still believe EAs can add value to the policy making here, for two main reasons: 1) domain expertise on EA cause areas (that Nordic planners may lack even though they are generally competent) and 2) specialization in different parts of the policy making value chain (e.g. EAs can take roles as information suppliers providing a fact base that Nordic policy makers don't have ca... (read more)

6
Charles He
3y
This makes a lot of sense. Thank you!

The part of the article that you are referring to is in part inspired by John and MacAskills paper “longtermist institutional reform”, where they propose reforms that are built to tackle political short-termism. The case for this relies on two assumptions:

1.    Long term consequences have an outsized moral importance, despite the uncertainty of long-term effects.
2.    Because of this, political decision making should be designed to optimize for longterm outcomes. 

Greaves and MacAskill have written a paper arguin... (read more)

5
kbog
3y
No I agree on 2!  I'm just saying even from a longtermist perspective, it may not be as important and tractable as improving institutions in orthogonal ways.

Thank you for your feedback, Flodorner! 

First, we certainly agree that a more detailed description could be productive for some of the topics in this piece, including your example on scenario planning and other decision making methods. At more than 6000 words this is already a long piece, so we were aiming to limit the level of detail to what we felt was necessary to explain the proposed framework, without necessarily justifying all nuances. Depending on what the community believes is most useful, we are happy to write follow-up pieces with either a h... (read more)

Thank you for your feedback kbog.

First, we certainly agree that there are other options that have a limited influence on the future, however, for this article we wanted to only cover areas with a potential for outsized impact on the future. That is the reason we have confined ourselves to so few categories. 

Second, there may be categories of interventions that are not addressed in our framework that are as important for improving the future as the interventions we list. If so, we welcome discussion on this topic, and hope that the framework can encour... (read more)

1
kbog
3y
I think it's really not clear that reforming institutions to be more longtermist has an outsized long run impact compared to many other axes of institutional reform. We know what constitutes good outcomes in the short run, so if we can design institutions to produce better short run outcomes, that will be beneficial in the long run insofar as those institutions endure into the long run. Institutional changes are inherently long-run.